Deepanjana Pal writes about the dread and determination with which we approach airports in a world grappling with (what began as) a travel-borne pandemic.

Two people walked up to a cluster of empty seats in a corner of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (CSMIA) in Mumbai. Every alternate seat had been labelled unusable, to ensure social distancing. People were sitting in small, scattered clusters, keeping rows between them and the next group or traveller. The two travellers chose seats that were more than 3 feet and less than 6 feet away from me. They were wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) — shoe covers; the onesie that looks like it’s made of paper; plastic shields on their faces; gloves on their hands. My gloves and owl-print cotton face mask felt almost inappropriately casual next to their getup.

Seconds ago, I’d felt the opposite while watching a family wipe down the seats they’d chosen for themselves. There was nary a glove nor mask visible on their persons. It seemed particularly irresponsible of them, since the family included one tottering toddler and one doddering grandma, but the reason for their masklessness became clear when they sat down and immediately tucked into their packed lunches. “See?” said the grandma, “Luchi aloo-dum is much better when it doesn’t taste of plastic.” The man nodded in agreement, “You can’t eat with gloves.” 

The toddler left her lunching family and on squeaking sneakers, walked up to the two PPE-clad travellers. She was clearly fascinated by these people, who looked like they were bubble-wrapped. One of the PPE-wearers waved while the other one sat down to take off a shoe cover. A bright pink sneaker emerged. The little girl’s jaw dropped. Noticing the reaction, the sneaker-wearer took off the other shoe cover with a magician’s flair. The girl giggled. 

It was all very cute until out came a tiny “pfft” of a sneeze. As sneezes go, it was quite dainty, thanks to an absence of snot and the little girl scrunching up her face. But the sneeze seemed to slow down time as everyone in hearing distance froze, each of us imagining pompom-shaped Sars-Cov-2 viruses vrooming their way out of the girl’s nose and into our own. The child’s mother was the first to break the spell when she got up and dragged the girl back inside the protective circle of her family. Pink Sneakers told their companion, “PPE zindabad.” 

This demand of unrelenting alertness is what makes Covid-19 so exhausting even if you are fortunate enough to not have contracted the infection. Innocent, simple things — like a toddler sneezing — are now laced with the possibility of danger. This is an infection that urges us to be suspicious of one another and view everything that is shared (right down to the air we breathe) as life-threatening. It pushes us to live in silos lined with the desperate hope that our bodies will not be manipulated by the virus to act against itself. From the way we may contract and prevent it, Covid-19 feels acutely reflective of our times. It’s as if the fears and polarising forces of our society have manifested into this shape-shifting virus that does to our physical bodies what toxic politics is doing to our body politic.   

In the middle of all this is the airport, the literal portal through which Covid-19 entered our lives, piggybacking on unsuspecting international travellers. 

According to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, there was a 57.2% decline in the number of passengers between January and October this year, compared to 2019. This is not surprising since airports have been shut for most of this period. Since October, there’s been some recovery, we’re told, but people are still wary of travel; of spending hours in enclosed spaces with strangers and familiars who may be virus-carriers. 

When I walked into Mumbai’s CSMIA on a September afternoon to take my first flight of the year, the airport looked emptier than I’d seen it after disembarking from international flights that landed at ungodly hours of the night. I said this to the man at the payment counter, while buying an unnecessary cup of coffee. “Now at least it looks like an airport. When we first reopened, it was like stepping into one of those sci-fi shows. You know, the ones in which the rescue team shows up to find everyone on the spaceship has been mysteriously killed,” he told me. It took me a moment to realise that behind his mask, he was grinning.  

Author F. Scott Fitzgerald once likened airports to oases, “like stops on the great trade routes”. Authors have mostly focused upon the sense of isolation that a traveller feels in an airport. In the poem “Autobiography at an Air-Station”, Philip Larkin wrote,

“…We amble to and fro,

Sit in steel chairs, buy cigarettes and sweets 

And tea, unfold the papers. Ought we to smile,

Perhaps make friends? No: in the race for seats

You’re best alone. …”

This is in stark contrast to how airports are depicted in films, where they are usually meeting grounds for foes, family and lovers. The airport is usually where the bad guys are caught, lovers meet and hope springs eternal. A standard trope of Hollywood, Bollywood and a forest of other celluloid woods has been the last-minute romantic reunion at an airport. That scene would sum up everything that endears pulpy love stories to its audiences — a hero and heroine coming together despite a powerful system that is designed to keep them apart. The airport’s security system symbolises the establishment’s authority, which the lovers defy and leave in shambles as the ticket and boarding pass-less hero races through an airport’s gates and hallways, chased by a host of hapless, uniformed guards. Love: 1. Security check: 0.

The reality of the airport is starkly different from both its literary and cinematic avatars. Christopher Schaberg, who has written four books analysing airports and the cultures they embody, describes it as an “in-between zone that, by definition, can never be here, and can never be there”.

For most people, the time spent at an airport is the least pleasant part of a trip and yet, as the lockdown lengthened, some of us started feeling nostalgic for that very experience. “Lockdown life is like being at an airport, but without a ticket or even a flight schedule,” wrote a friend. Another friend replied, “Minus the overpriced dosa and coffee, and the security guy that pats you down. All of which I want so damn desperately — even the security check — just because it comes with the guarantee of getting out.”

The airport is a strange space that has morphed over the past decades. As technology has evolved for both surveillance and air travel, it’s transformed from a simple point of departure to a site of boredom and resignation, where one could do nothing but wait. Then it turned into a daunting structure that intimidated travellers, both with its complicated layout and the growing presence of law enforcement and security paraphernalia. Today, airports are like forts with their layers of security that reduce an individual to a government-issued ID and seat number, but disguised as a wonderland, thanks to the shops and art installations. 

Even while airports have become like miniature cities, they’re less likely to befuddle a traveller today because contemporary airport design has improved significantly from the era that inspired Douglas Adams to write, “It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression ‘as pretty as an airport’. Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort.”

We can only imagine how Adams would have rolled his eyes at people thinking of airports with longing and nostalgia, as so many of us did during the lockdown. Everything from going through security check to buying overpriced coffee and the faintly-plastic taste of airport food felt exotic now that we were all cooped up in our homes. Within the looping sameness of lockdown life, the airport felt like a challenge in a medieval quest. It was fraught with the danger of contagion, but if you were brave and careful enough to find a way through it, you could exit the limbo of the past months. 

That sense of an adventure was in the Mumbai airport’s air conditioned air in September. You could see the tug of war between trepidation and determination outside the airport, where everyone took a long, deep breath before making their way through the automatic doors. Inside, people wiped down seats, wore PPE, and wherever you looked, someone was squirting sanitiser on their palms. My personal favourites remain the two women who came wearing shower caps and dishwashing gloves that matched their saris, in addition to their face masks (the best part: they were not travelling together.) One of them determinedly put on the face mask that the airline provided on top of the one she was already wearing, as though her wearing two masks would mitigate her travelling companion’s choice to wear his one mask around his chin. 

Somehow, the airport managed to look the same and yet feel different. It was familiar — the same routines of checking in, security check, baggage claim; the same shops —and yet there were the reminders of the pandemic — taped seats, airport staff sanitising surfaces, shops stating a preference for contactless payments. I was reminded of something Schaberg had said in an interview: “On one hand, airports want you to feel the verve of the new. On the other hand, airports want you to feel the comforts of the same, on and on and on.”

Two months later, the airport seemed fuller and no one was wearing PPE. The shops were open, the queues were long and the distances maintained between people had shrunk. Should it feel like a comfort that despite everything being turned upside down by contagion, there are spaces like the airport that can absorb changes and remain seemingly unchanged? Or is the static constancy of the airport a reflection of our arrogant assumption that rather than adapt to the world around us, we’ll control it? 

On one of the reclining chairs, a sleeping man had three face masks carefully arranged on his one face — one over his eyes, the second over his nose, the third on his chin — to ensure his mouth remained uncovered. I found myself wandering into the airport bookshop and buying a book, as I’ve always done at airport book shops. Then I found a suitably solitary seat near my assigned gate and settled down to ostensibly leaf through the book while actually eavesdropping on other people’s conversations. Someone’s mother was giving them instructions on how to reheat the food she’d packed. Someone else was arguing that Covid-19 might end the paparazzi business because honestly who will buy photos of actors in sunglasses, cap and a mask, looking like pretty much any other paranoid traveller? Two people were discussing the predictions of an astrologer. 

Within a few minutes, the conversations around me receded because the book was far more interesting than anything being discussed within earshot. So I sipped on my coffee and read about the great Mughal emperor Akbar while waiting for my flight to be announced.  

All this should have felt normal. Instead, it felt surreal. 

Deepanjana Pal is an author and journalist. She writes fiction (Hush A Bye Baby; the Puchku series) and non-fiction (The Painter: A Life of Ravi Varma), and works with Hindustan Times.